The present invention generally relates to an apparatus for reproducing or playing back pictures such as motion or moving pictures, those of television programs and the like. More specifically, the present invention is concerned with a method of making access to pictures by using a storage medium susceptible to random access such as a hard disk or the like and a system for carrying out the video picture access method. Parenthetically, the picture stored in a storage medium such as a hard disk, a digital video disk, a compact disk or an optical disk in general or the like for the playback will hereinafter be referred to as the video picture only for the convenience of description.
With the advent of hard disks of large capacity capable of storing a large volume of video picture over several ten hours and commercially available at a relatively low price, a video picture recording/reproducing apparatus equipped with the hard disk as the storage medium has been developed for practical use. Besides, a video picture recording/reproducing apparatus in which an optical storage medium such as DVD (Digital Versatile Disk) is also finding practical applications increasingly. An advantage common to these video picture recording/reproducing apparatuses is found in that because of implementation of the storage medium in the form of a disk, access to a given record can be accomplished at a very high speed. Even when a plurality of programs are recorded on a disk-like recording medium, searching of a given program can be realized almost instantaneously, differing from the recording on a video tape, in which case the indexing operation is possible only after the fast feeding or rewinding of the tape. Further, some of picture recording/reproducing software designed to run on a personal computer or the like is so designed or programmed as to create an index composed of leading images of plural scenes included in a video picture by arraying them in the form of a list or array containing representative images of reduced size so that a viewer or user can select the scene which he or she wants to view and reproduce instantaneously a corresponding video picture starting from the selected scene. Such combination of availability of the index information and the high accessibility to the disk-like recording medium as mentioned above provides excellent convenience to the user.